The Pop Shop was Keith Haring’s store, newly opened when Andy Warhol visited in May 1986. Warhol’s brief account captures the shop at the intersection of art, retail, and reproduction: it had a small staff and watches for sale, while Haring also proposed using Warhol’s Self-Portraits on its T-shirts.

Opening and Location

Warhol stopped at The Pop Shop on May 3, 1986, on the way with Paige to an opening by Kenny Scharf. The store had opened the previous week, but Warhol had not yet visited. He described it as difficult to find, tucked slightly out of the way, and wondered whether customers would make the effort to go there. There were people inside during his visit, and he bought watches.

The shop employed five people: two described as bosses and three younger workers, each paid eight dollars an hour. Warhol’s observations register the store as a working retail operation as well as an artistic venture, with staffing, wages, visibility, and customer access all part of its early prospects.

Warhol’s Self-Portraits on T-Shirts

The Pop Shop also became a proposed outlet for Warhol’s Self-Portraits. On May 5, Anthony d’Offay, visiting from London, said he had decided that he loved the works. Warhol recalled that earlier responses had seemed so uncertain that he had doubted they would be taken. In that uncertainty, he had agreed to Keith Haring’s request to use the portraits on T-shirts for the shop.

By then, Warhol believed about 200 shirts had been made, and he worried that they might all have to be bought back. The diary leaves the arrangement’s final outcome unstated, but records the complication created when permission to reproduce the portraits met with a changing response to the artworks themselves.

A Place for Art in Circulation

In these entries, The Pop Shop is defined less by architectural description than by what happened there: Warhol’s first visit, his purchase of watches, his scrutiny of the shop’s staffing and discoverability, and the possible circulation of his portraits as wearable images. The store’s out-of-the-way position sits alongside its ambition to attract customers, while the T-shirt episode shows how an artwork’s movement into retail could create practical consequences for the artist. The account presents the shop as a place where art was not only displayed or discussed, but made available through everyday goods.